This invention relates to telecommunications systems and data networks. Telecommunications services have generally lacked external continuous testing apparatus to perform and analyze leading and lagging performance indicators from an end user perspective. Methodologies have been introduced by manufacturers but lack and kind of third party verification of service level agreements and user experience.
Throughout the telecommunication industry, users struggle to rely on technology with little or no service level verification. Systems are installed and relied on to a greater and greater degree and still lack advanced external diagnostic devices to ensure trouble free-error free operation.
Existing manufacturer solutions look at the system from the perspective on the equipment and not from the perspective of the user. This creates a disparity between the user experience and the actual operation of the network. This disparity leads technology operators to a false sense of satisfaction with the technology's performance and unwarranted reliance.
In addition, managing these solutions without an objective user perspective can greatly increase costs and decrease user satisfaction with the solution. Operators are forced to rely on user complaints. Operators are then required to respond reactively to problems based on unreliable user feedback instead of engaging in proactive management based on objective continuous testing.
Managing hard-wired and wireless networks can also be a difficult task. This is true in remote locations, where various islands of connectivity may have weak or strong signals at any given time. Even communicating with hardware or software based appliances for management of such connectivity is often a difficult task, increasing the risk a particular area may be left without connectivity for a prolonged period of time due. This down time may occur due to lack of automated management and monitoring capability of the fact that the loss of connectivity itself inhibits the ability to detect and manage the cause of the disruption.
As noted above, even in urban areas, increased reliance and larger numbers of users on public and private Wi-Fi access points and cellular network digital capabilities, has increased the incidence of critical communication failures due to the fact that users have come to expect the same reliability more typical of a wired network. When failures occur, diagnosis of the point or points of failure is often delayed.
In an environment where both individuals and business entities increasingly rely on internet connectivity for personal and business communications, including commerce, banking, task management and calendaring, the ability to monitor connectivity and make corrections remotely, or dispatch personnel immediately to take corrective action, has become critical. In the area of business connectivity, providers of internet transport, ISPs, software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers, and cloud service providers often enter into Service Level Agreements (SLAs) which guarantee a certain percentage of up-time and specify the nature and timing of corrective actions to be taken. These types of agreements may not take into account that certain users are more isolated or more dependent on wireless technologies than others.
The need for reliable measurement and monitoring of wireless data communications has become particularly evident as wireless data communications have come to be used for continuous data streaming. Audio streaming has become a common method of receiving music and spoken word broadcasts via cellular and Wi-fi enabled devices. In particular video streaming consumes the largest percentage of total bandwidth for many users, and has become a significant service that data users depend on. According to a recent study, delivering a poor viewer experience cost global content brands about $2.16 billion in revenue in 2012, and the report notes that “without a shift to higher quality, content brands will miss out on an additional $20 billion through 2017.”
Based on 22.6 billion worldwide video streams analyzed throughout 2012, One service determined that about 60 percent of all video streams experienced quality degradation, including 40 percent that were impacted by low resolution picture because of low bitrates, 20.6 percent impacted by buffering and 19.5 percent impacted by slow startup.
Consumers of video streaming clearly noticed these failures. Research showed that in 2011, a one percent (1%) increase in the amount of time spent buffering during VOD (video-on-demand) usage led to three minutes less of viewing time. As VOD becomes even more ubiquitous, the situation further deteriorates. As of the present that same one percent of buffering time leads to an eight minute loss.
Online video providers know that consumers have low tolerance for problems with playback. Viewers are becoming increasingly less tolerant of a poor viewing experience when streaming online content while the content providers have little to no visibility into how frequently this intolerance occurs. As noted above, providers have typically viewed their networks in terms of equipment functionality and have not been able to measure or monitor the users' experience directly.
In addition to reliability and quality of service of raw communications data, the same issues have been manifest in what is generally referred to as the “internet of things” which maps physical entities onto their virtual representations. A prime example is the communication grid of both data and hardware in a hospital or other medical environment where many interoperable systems must communicate via wireless or wired networks and be accessed via smart devices from mobile or remote locations.
Another recent example that has received a great deal of publicity is the poor state of internet communications in the hospitality industry, notably poor Wi-Fi service in hotels and motels. Finally, there is a similar need for quality-of-service monitoring in the electrical power/smart grid arena where the status of power distribution is monitored via wired or wireless communications to ensure reliability of service, detect impending or current problems in the system, and secure the most rapid response for remedial actions.
The present system and apparatus address the current shortcoming in an economical way that includes all providers and users in a sophisticated monitoring and remediation system for data connectivity and represents a significant benefit both to the provider and consumer of internet services.